Thursday, February 06, 2014

Dropping the ball, not hiding it

Start of Koschman investigation looks more like a bungle than a conspiracy

Friday's print column

What did members of the Richard M. Daley administration know about the 2004 fatal attack on David Koschman, and when did they know it?

A Chicago Sun-Times story Wednesday about the release of special prosecutor Dan K. Webb's 162-page report on the case crisply stated what's become the conventional media narrative:

Daley, higher-ups in the mayor's office and others in Daley's Chicago Police Department were aware of (Daley nephew, Richard 'R.J.') Vanecko's involvement even as Koschman lay dying in a hospital with a cracked skull and swelling brain, Webb revealed.

If this is true, it means that from nearly Day One there was an elaborate, extraordinary, ongoing and shameful conspiracy at the highest levels of city government to protect a Daley relative.

But is it?

Is that what Webb revealed?

Thumbnail background: Vanecko (left) last week pleaded guilty to striking Koschman (right) during a drunken, wee-hours confrontation on Division Street. Koschman never regained consciousness and died 12 days later of a head injury.

Detectives who were assigned to the case in the immediate aftermath did a cursory investigation at best, working on it for only a day and leaving several stones unturned before taking scheduled time off. It was only after Koschman died and the case became a homicide investigation that police supervisors assigned another detective.

Webb quoted Chicago police Lt. Richard Rybicki, supervisor of the violent crimes unit, as saying that he learned Vanecko was a suspect "pretty shortly thereafter," or within a "a couple of days" of the incident.

Webb paraphrased Matthew Crowl, then Daley's deputy chief of staff for public safety, as saying Crowl "was uncertain of the exact date, but believed he became aware of the Koschman matter shortly after the incident, when someone at CPD informed him that a nephew of Mayor Daley had been involved in a bar fight on the North Side."

But nothing in the timeline of events bolsters these vague memories.

The police who actually conducted the first witness interviews say that Vanecko's name didn't surface until May 13, 18 days after the incident, when an eyewitness to the attack, one of Vanecko's friends, first disclosed Vanecko's name to a detective. And Webb said he found no evidence that members of the Daley administration ever interfered with the case.

Is it possible that police brass and city officials got Vanecko's name early on from some unknown source? And that they then withheld it from investigators while simultaneously ordering the case reopened?

Sure. And it's also possible that the original investigators lied to Webb and the grand jury, risking their reputations, careers and perhaps their freedom to protect the mayor and his kin.

As I read the report, however, it's more likely that Rybicki and Crowl, interviewed roughly nine years after the fact, were simply fuzzy about the order of events.

It's more likely that when police first got this case they treated it like a stupid, one-punch fight between drunken jamokes and not a big deal in a city where there were 448 homicides in 2004. After all, the first officer on the scene and his sergeant categorized it as "simple battery."

It's more likely that police dropped the ball while Koschman was still in the hospital — failing to interview at least six witnesses early on, failing to canvass the area for surveillance video and failing to work on the case at all for 13 days — than that they tried to hide it.

It's more likely that the "holy crap!" moment recalled by Rybicki when he saw the connection to the Daley family occurred after all this investigatory malfeasance had made the case harder to prosecute, and that all the dissembling, deflecting and other shenanigans that followed were in the service of covering police rear ends, not mayoral sensibilities.

In short, it's more likely that this extraordinary Koschman story didn't start with an extraordinary conspiracy, but, as with so many of cases of justice gone awry, with an ordinary series of screw-ups.

Good column. I found the later bungling by the police and the State's Attorney's Office more interesting, particularly the second time around, i.e. the instance in which Anita pledged to get to the bottom of it and presided over a flawed investigaiton that apparently did almost nothing, and certainly uncovered nothing.

Speaking of Anita's office, catch today's NATO 3 story. I wasn't there, so I'm relying on Schmadeke. He says that one prosecutor said the question was whether the defendants were bungling fools or calclating terrorists, then the other prosecutor argued in rebuttal closing that it didn't matter whether they were bungling fools, as long as they intended to be calculating terrorists. I hope everybody understands that their intent has been the focus of the entire trial, with the question being whether they could have had the necessary bad intent if in fact their intent was to talk big in front of the girl or in front of her and the other UC who kept egging them all on.

Then Schmadeke reports that one of the prosecutors asked the jury to put itself in the shoes of putative terrorist victims (“Would you be going to work the next day? Would you be sending your kids to school?”). Objection -- I hope they preserved that one.

Anita dropped the ball on the Koschman re-investigation, and now her prosecutors are playing dirty in the NATO 3 trial (what else is new; anything to win, right). Much was revealed about her office over the last few weeks. I suppose now the question whether this jury bails her out or lets the other shoe drop.

--I'd like to take your view on things, but you have to admit that the "missteps" really started to add up. Once Koschman comes in with a coma, any layman (at that moment) is going to say, "This isn't going to end well."

After two or three days in a coma (where, if I'm not mistaken, Vanecko's dad worked), are you going to tell me "Nah, nobody talked to Daley. Everyone's just moved on with their lives."?

ZORN REPLY -- You need a fairly active imagination. It assumes that Daley himself orchestrated a vast and dangerous conspiracy to obstruct justice when RJ Vanecko had yet even to be identified; that a whole range of police brass knew but pretended not to know that he was a suspect, assigned a new detective to the case and simply hoped he wouldn't stumble on the truth, etc. etc.
Occam's Razor, folks.

"It's more likely that when police first got this case they treated it like a stupid, one-punch fight between drunken jamokes and not a big deal in a city where there were 448 homicides in 2004. After all, the first officer on the scene and his sergeant categorized it as 'simple battery.'"

That's pretty much my take on the whole thing. Look, this happens all the time. I've witnessed it personally in that area. It looks like Koschman went after the group and Vanecko hit him. If that's all it is, I really don't blame Vanecko and I'm sure the cops shrugged it off too. The result is unfortunate but this was an accident. It was a one-in-a-million punch and I think the cops realized that.

ZORN REPLY -- I can't say if Vanecko's response was anywhere close to proportional or necessary... exactly what happened in that little melee is unclear to me and if everyone had stuck around and all given their accounts to the first responding officers we'd have a much cleaner though still undoubtedly murky story. Vanecko's actions in the aftermath suggest a guilty conscience.
Cops needed to isolate all the witnesses, find out where they had been go to those places, talk to wait staff, look for surveillance video &c., which they certainly would have had they taken it very, very seriously.

ZORN REPLY -- I can't say if Vanecko's response was anywhere close to proportional or necessary... exactly what happened in that little melee is unclear to me and if everyone had stuck around and all given their accounts to the first responding officers we'd have a much cleaner though still undoubtedly murky story. Vanecko's actions in the aftermath suggest a guilty conscience.
Cops needed to isolate all the witnesses, find out where they had been go to those places, talk to wait staff, look for surveillance video &c., which they certainly would have had they taken it very, very seriously.

GREG J REPLY -- No one can judge the response. Unfortunately, that includes the witnesses. I used to hang out in that area and I remember very little. No one there would be sober enough to be a worthwhile witness except maybe a doorguy if you're lucky. Or possibly they could have found a camera somewhere but that's about it.

Vanecko's actions suggest a guilty conscience but I'd have one too whether the punch was justified or not. That only means he's human. My only point in this is that whether you take it seriously or not, you're probably not getting a whole lot, and I can understand why they didn't take it seriously (at least right away) because it happens all the time.

I just keep getting this picture of the Vanecko/Koschman "fight" like the scene from (the cartoon version of) "Gulliver's Travels", where the huge Gulliver fends off the Liliputian "tough guy" by puttin his hand on the little guy's forehead & holding him back, while the little guy flails away, throwing punches that never even hit the big guy. Why did he feel the need to punch the guy?

Anyway, if it was even hinted at the scene that Vanecko was related to Daley, most everyone involved (police-wise) would have looked the other way almost instinctively, because the "other guy" would, of course, have been at fault because we should never blame a relative of the mayor, after all!

If this was just a botched police investigation over what was originally thought to be a simple battery charge resulting from a drunken brawl, I'm not sure Vanecko's identity helped or hurt further attempts to investigate. You could also say his relationship to the Daley family resulted in the press and others pursuing his arrest and subsequent trial years later, while he might not have been sought out if he hadn't ties to the Daley family.

In that situation, when someone rushes you, you have to put him down no matter what the size difference is. It's because you don't know what he's holding. Multiply that concern by 100 if it happens in a big city like Chicago. I'd actually be more concerned if a little guy came at me because I'd assume he had a weapon. In my youth, I was in some situations similar to that. It's scary and unpredictable. You can't afford to make assumptions based on size. That's a modern reality.

It looks like both -from my angle Eric. A conspiracy to bungle the investigation, and let time erase it from the public consciousness. Any public employee, from an alderman's desk person to a white house adviser, knows that the first rule of their job is to provide deniability for their boss when a cloud of suspicion drifts overhead! Did the Daley clout determined the outcome of the investigation? Certainly, but not at Daley's demand. His underlings knew what he expected, and they delivered to the city's emperor as the aldermen always did! Would the police have classified the case as “battery" if Koschman had delivered the punch and Daley’s nephew Richard Vanecko was dead? Of course not! Can a deadly punch be classified as an accident? No! Why then the case lingered for 9 years and required a special prosecutor, Dan K. Webb, to do justice for Koschman? Because every story has two sides, and Vanecko’s story and clout swept the case under the rug - until Webb looked under the rug 9 years later and recovered the truth from the Koschman’s side of the story! Nikos Retsos

ZORN REPLY -- You need a fairly active imagination. It assumes that Daley himself orchestrated a vast and dangerous conspiracy to obstruct justice

Does Daley have any precedent in his public career of doing something like this?

ZORN REPLY -- Not as far as I know. He stuck his head in the sand from time to time, and if you want to think that he pro-actively TOLD police that the suspect in the Koschman case was his nephew then somehow implied that they should screw up the investigation and yet still end up publicly ID-ing Koschman, I doubt I'm going to be able to talk you out of it.
I think it's been interesting that no one closely involved with this case -- the Koschman family lawyers, Webb's office, to whom I reached out before writing this column; those who have stated as fact that the cops knew about Vanecko before Koschman died -- has gainsaid my conclusions here, by email or on Twitter or Facebook.

For once, you missed the point. The original investigation wasn't killed by the police after they picked it up again; the Webb report suggests it was killed by the State's Attorney's Office.

Yawger called the head of Felony Review -- a highly unusual procedure. The head of Felony Review then seems to have taken over the case, and consulted closely with Bob Milan, then First Assistant, and then State's Attorney Dick Devine, also highly unusual. The only likely factor for their person involvement was the political sensitivity of the potential defendant. O'Brien apparently determined, after consulting with Devine and Milan, that charges would not be brought.

Remember that Dick Devine was the First Assistant State's Attorney under Rich Daley and you see where the matter was taken care of. It wasn't the police department -- or not just the police department. The matter was handled by the top, political levels, of the State's Attorney's Office. Devine may or may not have spoken with a Daley. He didn't need to. That's what he was there for.

Webb wasn't willing to say this directly, but he apparently wryly referred to it, in his very dry comment -- that O'Brien was "nevertheless able to divine" Vanecko's dtate of mind. Read that word "divine" with a different spelling and you see what Webb may have intended to imply.

Might have O'Brien not "approved" charges as no one was picked out in the lineup and no statement was given by any suspect. Who were they going to charge at that point? No one was even under arrest at that time as I believe there was no Probable Cause to arrest anyone at that time.

Dropping the ball, not hiding it
After reviewing "The Death of David Koschman, Report of the Special Prosecutor, Dan K. Webb", I must say what an embarrassment for the the Police Dept.

A fumble... yes a fumble and a kick every time the police received the ball, no, no this sounds more like a fixed or rigged game, some of the players were coerced, bought and paid and or indebted.
missing notes, lacking interviews, mishandled assignments, missing phone records, rigged lineups, and pure politics.
Kevin McCarthy and Bridget McCarthy not being separated and interviewed on the night of the altercation was the original ball drop. Then "Kevin McCarthy had
lied to police on two separate occasions about the identities of the other members of his group, police did not seek charges against him for obstructing justice" really, why not press charges, he was the one that had been hiding the ball.
Then you had the meeting back at the Pepper Canister after hours... what a webb we weave
Dropping the ball, not hiding it... no, more like digging a hole and trying to bury it.

ZORN REPLY -- I agree with this, "Kevin McCarthy and Bridget McCarthy not being separated and interviewed on the night of the altercation was the original ball drop." And there may have been tactical reasons for not charging McCarthy -- i/e, he clams up, takes the 5th and you lose your Vanecko ID, since Koschman's pals can't pick him out of a lineup so many days later. I really don't know about that.
Still waiting to see some kind of proof from someone that backs up the claim that Daley knew about Vanecko's involvement before Koschman died.

Yes, I agree we are all waiting for the proof of how soon Daley was aware of the situation with his nephew.
Accidents happen, which is what this was, had Vanecko stayed. To cut, run and hide out is simply wrong but what is to be expected from someone within the political dynasty of the Daley's... ? Even Craig Denham knew he had to cut and run to keep the Daley family out of this tragedy.

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"Change of Subject" by Chicago Tribune op-ed columnist Eric Zorn contains observations, reports, tips, referrals and tirades, though not necessarily in that order. Links will tend to expire, so seize the day. For an archive of Zorn's latest Tribune columns click here. An explanation of the title of this blog is here. If you have other questions, suggestions or comments, send e-mail to ericzorn at gmail.com.
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Contributing editor Jessica Reynolds is a 2012 graduate of Loyola University Chicago and is the coordinator of the Tribune's editorial board. She can be reached at jreynolds at tribune.com.